'Mad Men' recap: Daughters coping with c...

'Mad Men' recap: Daughters coping with c...

Michael Yarish/AMC

Don Draper (Jon Hamm), Megan Draper (Jessica Pare) and Dale Vanderwort (Tom Beyer) - Mad Men - Season 5, Episode 6

Mad Men held an unofficial and unsettling Daughters Night Sunday, with Sally, Megan and Peggy as the featured guests.

All three, it seems, are coping with a changing world much better than the people who are supposed to be helping them cope.

The way all three had holes punched in their balloons ultimately deflated a night that for a time seemed to be going rather well.

For those keeping score in the daughter game:

1. Sally.

Henrys mother, the housekeeper and babysitter from hell, broke her ankle, sending Sally and her brother to Dons place.

Henrys mother was last seen scaring Sally to death and then introducing her to prescription drugs. Combine her behavior with Bettys everyday parenting skills, which make the iceberg that sank the Titanic look warm and friendly, and the bar for nurturing Sally is set pretty low.

Anyhow, Megans parents are visiting Don, and they gently bully Don into letting Sally come watch him get an award at a black-tie dinner.

So they take Sally out shopping for grownup clothes and buy her a dress thats a little too old for her. They also ply her with makeup.

She makes a grand entrance as they are all about to leave and everyone, including the visiting Roger, gasps over how grownup she looks.

Don, stunned, tells her to lose the makeup or shes not going.

They get to the dinner and everyone scatters, leaving Sally nominally under the wing of Roger, whos very nice to her when hes not working either the room or Megans mother.

So heres Sally just exactly where all tweens want to be, mingling with the grownups in a grownup place. And whats shes doing is sitting at this big old table in this big old room, all by herself with no one interested enough to tell her what to do next.

She starts to pick at a plate of grownup food. After the first bite, she makes the same face Megan made last week when she hated the Howard Johnsons orange sherbet.

And then it gets worse.

Bad Part One is Sally accidentally opening a door and seeing Roger and Megans mother doing something she cant completely absorb, but she knows is really really wrong.

Bad Part Two is Megans father, when Sally comes out in her makeup, saying that Don shouldnt worry because all little girls eventually spread their legs and fly away.

Hey, Sal! Welcome to the genteel, kind, thoughtful world of a distinguished professor!

At the end of the evening, all Sally wants to do is call her disgraced lower-class friend Glenn at his boarding school.

Hows the city? he says.

Dirty, she replies.

2. Megan.

Megan has to explain to Don that her parents argue all the time because her father is a pig and her mother is a tramp.

She also has to hear her father tell her that marrying Don means she had given up on her life, skipping the struggle that gives life meaning and jumping right to the decadent bourgeois rewards.

As this suggests, Megans father is a professed Marxist. His actual behavior suggests he is one of those Marxists who loves the theoretical masses, but holds the real ones in contempt.

Megan, meanwhile, is showing every sign of having brilliant professional skills, and pursuing them despite his hostility.

3. Peggy.

Peggy agrees to move in with her boyfriend Abe and invites her mother over for dinner so they can tell her.

They do. She gets up to leave. Peggy asks if she would have preferred Peggy not tell her. Yeah, she replies.

That boy will just use you for practice, she tells Peggy. Youre lonely? Get a cat.

She takes her cake and goes home.

In happier news Sunday night, Megan gets the idea that finally sells the annoying Heinz Baked Beans account. Then she prods Don into an impromptu tap dance that convinces the client to buy it.

This is good news for viewers, who were about to get really sick of Heinz, and even better news for Don.

After he gets over the shock and disorientation of Megan having a brain and skills, he finds it incredibly erotic. Celebratory skillset sex, it turns out, is even better than makeup sex, and it saves you the trouble of fighting first.

Roger proselytizes about LSD, but startles everyone by also going after a new account when hes not going after Megans Mom.

Sunday also includes a couple of clever and slightly mysterious girl scenes.

One has Peggy telling Megan to be happier about the Heinz win. In another, Joan gives Peggy advice on boys.

The subtext of these scenes may not be clear for a while. No matter. Given the rest of Sundays events and exchanges, the smartest thing all daughters can do is talk amongst themselves.